Mohammad Alfaraj Takes Stories of Al-Ahsa Around the World
Discover how Saudi artist Mohammad Alfaraj transforms the landscapes, memories and traditions of Al-Ahsa into internationally recognised art.
Artists Spotlight
"I try to create work from the fragments I gather in this scavenger hunt we call life. A hunt for truth, love, empathy, poetry, and growth."
For Saudi artist Mohammad Alfaraj, a palm tree is never just a tree. Its leaves can become wings, its trunk a ladder, and its presence the beginning of a story. Growing up in the oasis of Al-Ahsa, he learned to see imagination in the most familiar things. Today, that way of looking at the world has taken his work from the agricultural landscapes of eastern Saudi Arabia to galleries and biennials across Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Born in 1993, Alfaraj is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans photography, filmmaking, sculpture, installation and writing. His works bring together natural materials, everyday memories, local traditions and imaginary characters to explore how people relate to one another and the environment. In December 2025, he received the Emerging Artist Gold Award at the inaugural Art Basel Awards in Miami Beach. The recognition marked a major international milestone for an artist whose creative identity remains deeply connected to the place where he was born and continues to live.
From Photographing Village Life to Becoming an Artist
Mohammad Alfaraj's artistic journey began with a camera rather than a formal art education. As a teenager, he purchased his first DSLR and began photographing weddings and funerals in his village. Although the work provided a small income, it also introduced him to the emotional significance of photography. He became fascinated by its ability to preserve people, places and experiences that would otherwise disappear.
He developed his technical skills through amateur photography groups in Al-Ahsa, learning composition, exposure and camera techniques from fellow photographers and online forums. His academic path initially took him in another direction. In 2017, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in Applied Mechanical Engineering from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran. Yet, he continued pursuing photography and documentary filmmaking throughout his studies.
Travel further expanded his artistic perspective. Experiences in the United States, Europe, Egypt, Japan and South Korea introduced him to different visual cultures and approaches to storytelling. Support from organisations including the Saudi Art Council and Art Jameel helped him develop his practice professionally. An early milestone came in 2015, when his documentary Lost won first place in the student category at the Saudi Film Festival in Dammam. His practice subsequently expanded into experimental film, sculpture, poetry and large-scale installation.
First-prize-winner of Hayy Jameel Commission.
How Al-Ahsa Became His Artistic Language
Al-Ahsa is far more than Mohammad Alfaraj's birthplace. Its agricultural traditions, palm groves, water channels and communities form the foundation of his artistic practice. Growing up in a desert oasis, he witnessed the relationship between human life and the natural environment. Farmers, labourers and families depended on the resources around them, often finding imaginative ways to reuse materials rather than discard them. That resourcefulness became central to his creative philosophy.
Alfaraj recalls the traditional arish, simple resting shelters made from palm leaves and repurposed objects, sometimes including old doors. For him, their construction demonstrated how ordinary materials could acquire entirely new meanings. The same principle appears throughout his artworks. Palm fronds, dates, soil, charcoal, discarded clothing and other found materials become sculptures, installations and characters within larger stories. He often combines these objects with memories of local workers, agricultural practices and children's games.
His work also draws attention to environmental change and the relationship between humans and other living beings. Rather than presenting nature solely as something beautiful or fragile, he examines how people depend on it, transform it and sometimes damage it. For Alfaraj, even an abandoned object can carry a history worth remembering.
The Stories Behind His Most Recognised Works
Muhammad Alfaraj's artistic world is populated by birds, dragonflies, palm trees and imaginative creatures. Through films, sculptures and installations, he transforms familiar elements of Al-Ahsa into stories about friendship, memory, nature and human relationships.
1) The Date Fruit of Knowledge (2022)
This experimental stop-motion film uses hand-drawn images in sand to tell the story of a bird, a dragonfly and a hybrid creature living in a desert oasis. Inspired by Arabic storytelling traditions, it explores friendship, cooperation and the understanding that wisdom comes through time and experience. The film travelled internationally, reaching audiences in Japan, Paris, Switzerland and Qatar. It also became the focus of his 2023 solo exhibition at Mennour Gallery in Paris, an important milestone in bringing his storytelling to European audiences.
The Date Fruit of Knowledge, a film inspired by storytelling traditions and the landscape of Al-Ahsa.
2) The Whispers of Today Are Heard in the Garden of Tomorrow (2024)
Presented at the 2024 Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in Riyadh, this installation combines photographs printed on fabric, sculptures made from discarded palm sprouts and a charcoal mural created from burned palm trees. Through these materials, Alfaraj documents disappearing agricultural traditions while exploring environmental change, memory and hope for the future. The work also gained international arts coverage, including attention from Sotheby's and Architectural Digest Middle East.
Mohammad Alfaraj’s The Whispers of Today Are Heard in the Garden of Tomorrow, featuring palm tree murals and sculptures.
3) Seas Are Sweet, Fish Tears Are Salty (2025)
Held at Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai from June 2025 to January 2026, this was Alfaraj's first institutional solo exhibition. Curated by Rotana Shaker, it brought together photographs, films, sculptures, poetry, sound installations and newly commissioned works across the centre's galleries and gardens. Recurring images of birds, hands and palm trees explored ecological change and relationships between living beings, while an interactive structure invited visitors to become storytellers. The exhibition attracted international art coverage and marked a major institutional milestone in his career. Later in 2025, Alfaraj received the Art Basel Emerging Artist Gold Award for his broader artistic practice.
4) What Was the Question Again? (2026)
Created for Desert X AlUla 2026, this large-scale installation features a maze-like structure centred around a sculptural tree formed from grafted trunks. Inspired by Alfaraj's childhood memories of his grandfather grafting trees and an acacia tree supporting another species, it explores coexistence, renewal and the connections between living beings. Presented at the fourth edition of the internationally recognised open-air biennial, held from January 16 to February 28, 2026, the work brought his artistic vision into dialogue with the landscape of AlUla alongside installations by Saudi and international artists.
The installation also demonstrates an evolution in Alfaraj's thinking. His childhood memories are no longer simply material for personal storytelling. They become ways of examining larger questions about ecology, survival and empathy.
Exhibitions That Brought His Work Beyond Saudi Arabia
Alfaraj's international exhibition history reflects the growing reach of his practice. His early presentations included Still Life and Plastic Dreams at ATHR Gallery in Jeddah in 2020, alongside his participation in I Love You, Urgently during 21,39 Jeddah Arts Week. In 2021, he presented Limbs of the Past, Offering to the Future at Alserkal Avenue in Dubai.
The following year brought participation in the 16th Lyon Biennale in France and Find Me Through the Fog at Al Moftaha Village in Abha. He subsequently participated in the Islamic Arts Biennale in Jeddah in 2023 and the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale in 2024. His professional development also included residencies at Can Serrat in Barcelona in 2019, the AlUla Art Residency in 2022 and London's Delfina Foundation in 2024.
Limbs of the Past, an Offering of the Future (2022): Mixed-media installation featuring found objects and natural materials.
From Art Basel Recognition to a Solo Exhibition in Paris
In 2025, Alfaraj was selected as a medalist in the inaugural Art Basel Awards' Emerging Artist category before receiving the category's Gold Award in December. The recognition placed him among internationally acclaimed artists selected through a peer-driven process and reviewed by leaders from major cultural institutions. Despite his growing international recognition, Alfaraj continues to draw inspiration from his hometown.
“Seeing my family and the people of Al Ahsa being so resourceful in their everyday life definitely motivates me,”
His international presence continued through the 2025 Taipei Biennial and, in October 2026, the opening of I'd Rather Be a Dragonfly Than a Lion at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Running from October 9, 2026, to January 18, 2027, the exhibition marks his first solo presentation at a French institution. It brings together stop-motion animations, photographs, drawings and sculptural objects. Alfaraj creates his own characters and sets, writes the narratives and performs the stories himself, continuing his interest in combining handmade objects with filmmaking and theatrical storytelling.
The exhibition also signals the next stage of his career. Presented in partnership with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, it precedes a planned solo exhibition at Mathaf in 2028. Represented by ATHR Gallery in Saudi Arabia and Mennour in Paris, Alfaraj continues to establish a presence across different international art communities while maintaining his practice in Al-Ahsa.
Keeping the Imagination of Al-Ahsa Alive
There is something distinctive about an artist who has travelled across the world yet continues to find new stories in the place where he grew up. For Muhammad Alfaraj, artistic growth has not required leaving his surroundings behind. Instead, international exposure has given him new ways to interpret the familiar.
The palm tree remains an especially fitting symbol of his journey. Rooted in the agricultural landscape of Al-Ahsa, it has appeared in films, sculptures and installations that have reached audiences around the world. Alfaraj once described its moving leaves as wings that had carried him across borders. His career gives that image a particular resonance. As Saudi Arabia's contemporary art scene gains wider international attention, Mohammad Alfaraj offers an example of how deeply local stories can speak to audiences far beyond their place of origin.
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